Book Image

PostgreSQL 12 High Availability Cookbook - Third Edition

By : Shaun Thomas
Book Image

PostgreSQL 12 High Availability Cookbook - Third Edition

By: Shaun Thomas

Overview of this book

Databases are nothing without the data they store. In the event of an outage or technical catastrophe, immediate recovery is essential. This updated edition ensures that you will learn the important concepts related to node architecture design, as well as techniques such as using repmgr for failover automation. From cluster layout and hardware selection to software stacks and horizontal scalability, this PostgreSQL cookbook will help you build a PostgreSQL cluster that will survive crashes, resist data corruption, and grow smoothly with customer demand. You’ll start by understanding how to plan a PostgreSQL database architecture that is resistant to outages and scalable, as it is the scaffolding on which everything rests. With the bedrock established, you'll cover the topics that PostgreSQL database administrators need to know to manage a highly available cluster. This includes configuration, troubleshooting, monitoring and alerting, backups through proxies, failover automation, and other considerations that are essential for a healthy PostgreSQL cluster. Later, you’ll learn to use multi-master replication to maximize server availability. Later chapters will guide you through managing major version upgrades without downtime. By the end of this book, you’ll have learned how to build an efficient and adaptive PostgreSQL 12 database cluster.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)

Obtaining and installing HAProxy

Another great way of abstracting PostgreSQL is to place it behind a proxy to redirect traffic to the primary read/write node in our cluster. One of the most popular of these proxies is HAProxy, a generic proxy software that was originally designed for load balancing web servers.

It's also a highly versatile layer that we'll be using in several other recipes in this book. Not only does it ensure we always reach the primary node regardless of its location, but we can also leverage its functionality to spread read queries across multiple PostgreSQL replicas.

This recipe will explain the basic installation of this high-availability connection proxy, which we can then extend later on.

Getting ready

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